It’ll only have been two-and-a-half years from launch to landing

The company needed a new client for two reasons, the first of which was that its old web-based client used Flash. Adobe’s spawn is a byword for dodgy security so VMware owed its users something safer. The second reason was that VMware’s C# vSphere client was - how shall we put this? – bad. Just bad.

So VMware got to work on the HTML5 client and delivered it in dribs and drabs, sometimes in the unsupported “Flings” that emerge from Virtzilla’s labs. It’s shipped with vSphere 6.5 ad 6.7 and been quite usable for a while now, but hasn’t been able to do everything that previous clients could.

That will change in (northern) autumn 2018 according to a new post by June Yang, product management veep of Virtzilla’s Cloud Platform Business Unit.

A comment on the post by someone by the name of “Steve” offered one perspective on the situation. (Here it is as a screen-shot in case it is deleted.)

This should have been done at least 12 months ago. I can’t believe an enterprise software company like VMware has taken this long to implement a usable management interface for their flagship product. I can’t believe that the original web client shipped with such terrible performance and usability to start with. I can’t believe the c-sharp client was abandoned before an adequate replacement was available. I can’t believe that an enterprise software company that provides software that runs highly secure and mission critical applications would base a web client on FLASH.

Ouch! But also easy to understand, because two-and-a-half years is rather a long time to wait for a much-needed new client. Especially for a company that relies on the goodwill of sysadmins who spend rather a lot of time using software of this sort. ®